The Last Days Of Pompeii

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All Rise...

Judge Steve Evans says watching this drama from the makers of King Kong is slightly more enjoyable than being heaped with burning ash.

The Charge

A sky ablaze in flame and ash!

Opening Statement

The producer, director, screenwriter, and special-effects maestro who brought
the original King Kong to life
re-teamed two years later for this historical spectacle. This slow-moving
melodrama accelerates in the final reel with a wild climax of destruction and
chaos, engineered by one of the earliest—and greatest—effects
technicians in Hollywood.

Facts of the Case

In the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, peaceful blacksmith Marcus (Preston
Foster, My Friend Flicka) refuses to
fight as a gladiator no matter how much money he is offered. He prefers the
quiet family life with his wife and infant son. But when his wife dies for lack
of proper medical care, Marcus picks up a sword and begins to kill for a fistful
of gold coins. Violent death and shady business deals pay well, and soon Marcus
is the wealthiest man in Pompeii. His son Flavius (John Wood, Luck of the
Navy) grows to manhood and chooses a different path. Having encountered
Jesus on the road to Judea, Flavius turns toward Christianity and quickly
discovers his beliefs in peace and equality clash with his father's avaricious
values. Flavius vows to free the slaves of Pompeii. In Jerusalem, Marcus visits
Pontius Pilate (Basil Rathbone, The
Adventures of Robin Hood), who plots his political schemes and "washes
his hands" of the Messiah's fate. As Jesus faces crucifixion, Marcus barely
escapes the rioting in Jerusalem with his friend Burbix (sturdy contract player
Alan Hale, who would also appear in The Adventures of Robin Hood as
Little John, opposite Rathbone and Errol Flynn). Returning to Pompeii, Marcus
learns his son has joined the slave rebellion. As the skies darken with volcanic
ash, Mt. Vesuvius rumbles ominously outside the city.

The Evidence

This picture was made by famed producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest
Schoedsack and stop-motion animation pioneer Willis O'Brien after they stunned
the world with King Kong. Like the
classic, giant-monkey film, this tale of the Roman Empire was penned by Ruth
Rose, Cooper's wife and longtime collaborator. The Last Days of Pompeii
delivers solid production values (and dubious history), while serving up
spectacular destruction when Vesuvius inevitably erupts as it must. Until then,
there is plenty of talk to pad the running time. Even the arena battles are
rather pedestrian. Schoedsack relies heavily on montage, symbolism and
portentous dialogue to propel the plot. And there's the problem. The basic story
of financial hardship and family values clashing in a moral conundrum is spun
from thin fabric. There's just not enough narrative cloth to drape across a
feature-length film, especially a picture that exists mainly as a showcase for
O'Brien's special effects genius. His talents with miniatures and optical
trickery remain impressive 70 years on—if we look at it in the context of
pre-computer technology.

Although computer-generated imagery may be more convincing, film
connoisseurs should take time to savor the craftsmanship that went into these
early spectacles at the dawn of the sound era. True, there's not much of
O'Brien's signature stop-motion work in this picture. But his skill in combining
miniatures, artificial lava and full-scale sets with hundreds of stampeding
actors is proof that O'Brien was expert at much more than manipulating rubber
dinosaur puppets a frame at a time. In Pompeii, his effects are more convincing
than Foster and especially Rathbone, whose acting in this picture makes a wooden
Indian look positively dynamic.

DVD video and audio are as good as the 70-year-old source materials. No
restoration effort appears to have been made, as the film is pocked with
scratches, blemishes, and apparent flecks of dirt on a faded print. No extras on
the disc; not even a trailer, which is disappointing, given the film's
pedigree.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

Composer Roy Webb receives credit for the original music score, but there's
more going on here than meets the ear. There's no question that large portions
of the score, particularly during the climax, were lifted directly from Max
Steiner's classic score for the original King Kong, another RKO Radio Pictures
property. Such uncredited appropriations were common under the old studio
system, when everyone worked under contract and the major production companies
controlled everything.

This practice of musical cribbing continues today. Listen during the trailer
for the recent Disney picture Chicken
Little and you'll hear snippets of the 1994 score for Roland Emmerich's Stargate. Disney also got a lot of
mileage out of The Rocketeer soundtrack,
which was reused in dozens of trailers through the 1990s.

But let's return to the audio for Pompeii. Careful listeners will realize
that the foley artist also reused some of the old Kong sound effects, most
memorably the awful screams of sailors plunging to their doom from the log
bridge and, in an earlier scene, the poor fellow picked off a tree and devoured
by an Apatosaurus. Those hideous yodels and yelps are heard again and again in
ancient Pompeii, as extras are pulverized under tumbling temples and crumbling
statues. Obsessive film historians might wonder how long it took a studio like
RKO to amortize a reel of sound effects across the budgets for half a dozen or
more films.

Closing Statement

The Last Days of Pompeii was released on DVD the same day as a trio of
Cooper's more famous films (all featuring O'Brien's animated apes)—King Kong, Son of Kong, and Mighty Joe Young. Warner probably did this
as a housecleaning measure—dust off and release an obscure title by one of
the fathers of epic filmmaking on the same day as its more famous siblings. Good
marketing ploy, since the primary audience for this picture will be O'Brien's
fans and special effects enthusiasts. Like his other lesser-known films, such as
The Black Scorpion, O'Brien's special effects in The Last Days of
Pompeii are more interesting than the actors reacting in front of them.

The Verdict

Guilty of inducing restlessness until the mighty Vesuvius climax, The Last
Days of Pompeii only comes to life when most of the characters meet violent
death. For the grimly effective climax this court applauds O'Brien's masterful
techniques as the work of a true effects innovator. Sadly, his efforts went
virtually unrecognized by film lovers until long after his death in 1963. Even a
1949 special effects Oscar for Mighty Joe
Young seems inadequate compensation for a man who devoted his life to
conjuring non-stop wonders on a movie screen via the painstaking process of
stop-motion animation.